New Nathan Bell album due out June

The Americana artist who’s been described as “the Woody Guthrie we need in the age of globalization” (and God do we need some of him right now), Nathan Bell has announced the release of his upcoming LP, “LOVE>FEAR (48 hours in traitorland)” which will be released on June 30th via Stone Barn Records. Along with the announcement, Bell shared his new single “Traitorland (rules for living in)” over at No Depression which you can hear below.

Bell talked extensively about the political background to his new record: “Right before we did the deed and elected an oligarch, PT Barnum-style scam artist, I started thinking it was time to collect some of the political songs I’d written over the years, and combine them with some of the new ones I’d been working on,” he says. “I’ve always been resistant to slogans and catchphrases, so Traitorland is more an album of pointed stories about people affected by the callousness of the wealthy and the power brokers. Nowadays, they’re so disconnected from the working class—they’re even more cruel than Carnegie was. Paul Ryan—I don’t know how he sleeps at night. I don’t know how a man like Steve Bannon is allowed to spend a day near whoever’s in power. My family’s half Jewish, and I look at Bannon and think, ‘Great, we’re either gonna have to run or fight again.’ So the album comes from that.”

“There are people all around us who believe differently than we do,” Bell says. “Good people. And in the basics of their daily life, the political sign in their yard is no reflection on who they are to their neighbors. Over the last few years, we’ve forgotten this, and a certain level of humanity has disappeared. To me, the whole point of liberal politics is, we let people in even if they’ve made a mistake. I was out walking my dogs a few weeks ago, and I ran into one of my neighbors down the street, and she says, ‘Hey, I voted for Trump, and I’m scared shitless. Did you vote for Trump?’ Now that’s a golden opportunity. I said, ‘No, I didn’t vote for him. He scares the hell out of me, and he’s got a Nazi working with him.’ So we stood there and talked for awhile, and I find out she’s a fiscal conservative, she’s a little bit socially conservative, but like a lot of people in the South, she’s got six gay cousins she likes just fine. So we had a conversation, which is what we’re supposed to do. Let the other side be exclusive, keep people out, and pretend everyone should be divided up into groups; at the end of the day, no matter how hard we fight, even if it means physical dissent, when the war is over, people are still people. It’s how you avoid the Hutus and the Tutsis warring back and forth, chopping each other up with machetes. If someone comes to you and says, ‘Look, I shouldn’t have voted for assholes the last 12 years. How do we put our country back together and make sure everybody’s protected?’ then you’ve got to accept that. It’s hard, but you’ve gotta look some assholes in the eye and accept that maybe they’ve changed. I can’t forgive a fucking Nazi, I think—until I meet some guy who was a skinhead for 25 years, and spends the rest of his life working in the AIDS ward trying to atone for it. There’s always some reason for you to doubt your certainty.”

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